All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959 (34 page)

However, Strasberg did bond an ensemble; even critics scoffing at Group playwrights admired the clarity of Group actors. Theatre people found the performances fascinating, and while Groupthink rejected glamor, especially in its Winchellian form, certain Group actors came to win the era’s highest form of prizegiving, mention in The Column. Then, too, one cannot deny the impressive collection of talents subsumed in Strasberg’s regime. There were an unusual number of character actors, a lack of Rollo Peters. But we note future Lear Morris Carnovsky, Lee J. Cobb, Sylvia Sydney, Jane Wyatt, brash young man John Garfield, Van Heflin, Charles Bickford; future directors Elia Kazan and Robert Lewis; future acting teachers Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler, who was also the Group’s Leading Lady till Hollywood star Frances Farmer came east for
Golden Boy
and Robert Ardrey’s
Thunder Rock
(1939).

As for these and others deserting the Group for the movies (or for higher-paying jobs elsewhere on Broadway), I’ve already stated how comfortable it is to call “whoring” what penniless actors think of as a shot at financial stability and professional recognition. Why do we never hear sneers at the Hollywood pilgrimages of Theatre Guild regulars Helen Westley and Dudley Digges, not to mention people like Bette Davis, who went Hollywood at the first invitation and seldom returned, or people like Clark Gable, who never returned at all? A persistent Broadway legend forms a kind of mantra for Group “disloyalty”: John Garfield was so outraged when Harold Clurman preferred Luther Adler to Garfield as Golden Boy Joe Bonaparte that Garfield stormed off to California. True, Odets had promised the role to Garfield, who was also closer in age to Joe (“211⁄2,” Odets says, precisely, when the play begins) than the thirty-something Adler. True as well, Clurman was romantically involved with Stella Adler, Luther’s sister. But Clurman thought Garfield lacked the range for the part. Adler had versatility and a great reserve of inner strength; absorbing fight-game atmosphere in city gyms, he even started working out and put on a build. This, we are told, is when Garfield walked. On the contrary, though Garfield had every right to believe that his Big Break had been denied him through office politics, he joined the
Golden Boy
cast in a small (if showy) role. And he stayed with the production for five months before leaving to seek his destiny with Warner Bros.

Now for this Strasbergian Method, which one adherent has defined as “how not to act.”
Be
natural, remember? That is: no showboating or attitudinizing, and none of the automatic communication that actors call “indicating.” Try, from a later time, Martin Landau’s definition: “Find it. Express it. Suppress it.” The character content must “leak out.”

That seems sensible rather than innovative, but only because we take it for granted today. Before the Group promulgated the new style, American acting was typified in—just for example—Miriam Hopkins, a now and again stage actress who specialized in movie stardom. Her work is thus amply preserved for us, and we find in it less a series of characters than one go-everywhere character. To Martin Landau’s equation, she might have replied, “Be Miriam Hopkins. Expound Miriam Hopkins. Exalt Miriam Hopkins.”

Yet the woman Had Something; all the stars of her day did. Strasberg’s training enabled those who Didn’t to excel—Morris Carnovsky, for another example. He was never a star in the Miriam Hopkins sense, yet his reviews suggest an American Olivier.

Of course, some of our greatest actors have dismissed Strasberg’s teaching as affectation, a Chinese box of processes, actorism. Jason Robards occasionally did. But isn’t it likely that Robards’ character prep accorded at least somewhat with Strasberg’s program, only without the site-specific terminology and endless discussion?

What is more abstract than the map of portrayal? To the unbeliever, Strasberg’s sin was to specify the abstract, not least in that affective memory, plowing back through the actor’s life to match his responses to his character’s. Such fastidious autobiography, however, created the Group’s unity of style. And this unity influenced not only other actors but dramatists as well: better acting necessitated better writing, for an honest actor cannot play a false line.

We see this development leading Group playwrights in particular to minimize or eject entirely those expository tip-off statements assigned to characters who would never have cause to say them in real life. One thinks of Tom Stoppard’s spoof of this old-fashioned heads-up approach in the opening line of the murder thriller in
The Real Inspector Hound,
as the housekeeper answers the telephone:

MRS. DRUDGE:
Hello, the drawing-room of Lady Muldoon’s country residence one morning in early spring?

Clifford Odets all but eradicates this usage, even in
Waiting For Lefty,
though it has to tell six different tales, each with its own data to fill in—“Joe and Edna,” “Labor Spy Episode,” “The Young Actor.” Somehow, Odets picks up each of the six actions just at the moment when all the necessary information would spill out naturalistically. And
Awake and Sing!
may be the first fourth-wall, box-set American drama without a single line of conventional exposition. The curtain rises on the Bergers at the dinner table in the lines quoted (with some deletions for space) on page 201. Note how young Ralph just starts in, giving voice to something on his mind without a single word of explanation. He doesn’t say “down at my place of business” to make sure the audience will understand him. He phrases it as he would phrase it in that location to those characters: “down the place.”
They
know what he means. It is up to the eavesdropping public to catch up to Odets’ realism, and to learn what the family relationships are from how they treat each other.

Odets’ other plays are not quite so innocent of expository announcements.
Golden Boy
starts in the middle of itself, as a guy tells a woman, “Pack up your clothes and go! Go! Who the hell’s stopping you?” but then backs up for some explanations. Still, it’s exciting to see a Group writer leading his colleagues on to the discovery of perfect realism.

Elsewhere on The Street, some writers merrily went on megaphoning details of the backstory through the first fifteen minutes of playing time. It will be instructive, now, to jaunt over to the Plymouth Theatre, where Clare Boothe’s
Margin For Error
(1939) is playing, because Boothe is not only typically mainstream in her craft but the opposite of a Group writer in every particular.

A comic melodrama-cum-whodunit,
Margin For Error
treats comings and goings in the German consulate of an unnamed American city, where, at the end of Act One, the Consul is shot before our eyes. Because Hitler is just then ranting and screaming over the radio on an international hookup, the others on stage don’t hear the shot and see nothing.
We
do—but the murder is all the same a mystery, because the Nazi was poisoned
before
he was shot: so who done it?

As Erich von Stroheim had played villainous Germans during World War I, so Otto Preminger did the honors here; the rest of the cast was also strictly typed. Sam Levene offered the scrappy, sarcastic Jewish cop who solves the murder, and the Clark Gable role of the Irreverent Reporter (whose “affected carelessness of attire,” says Boothe, “merely underscores his self-assured masculine appeal”) went to Leif Erickson, a sometime Group player and the husband of Frances Farmer.

Margin For Error
not only hires its people off the rack but allows them to present information to characters who already have the information: to tell the audience. Thus, Preminger’s of course long-suffering wife tells Preminger’s secretary how his boss accepts bribes to help Jewish people in Germany and then doesn’t:

SOPHIE:
What about all those other poor people who come here?… He takes their money, and never even writes a word to Berlin about their relatives.

She’s acting like a character in a play—something we find seldom or never in the scripts the Group took on.

True,
Margin For Error
is event theatre, a mustering of troops. There were a number of such anti-Nazi plays at this time, including one from the Group, Irwin Shaw’s
The Gentle People
(1939), which saw a gala Return From Hollywood, by Franchot Tone. He played the neighborhood gangster whose shakedowns rouse two dreamy immigrant Americans—the title roles—to murder him. That is: democrats must not appease but kill fascism. No words. Make war.

That brings us to another of the common criticisms of the Group: that it was simply the most prominent of the decade’s many left-wing theatre companies. But once again the Group stands out, for its rejection of easy-solution propaganda pieces, whether of the Theatre Union or the
Margin For Error
kind. Clurman, Crawford, and Strasberg were liberals, but unlike many of their colleagues they did not indulge fascists of the left on that doctrine of “at least they’re
our
fascists.” Hallie Flanagan knew that the Communist Party was taking over middle-management positions in the Federal Theatre to crowd out political independents, yet she did nothing to stop it. But when the Party made repeated attempts to control the Group through certain of its writers and actors—as Odets and Kazan later testified—the three Group chiefs blithely but firmly shut the Party up. This was to have a far-reaching effect, too, for it was ultimately the Group that affirmed for Broadway that the valid style in sociopolitically progressive theatre must center on human character, not on revolutionary programs.

Let us consider three samples from the Group’s catalogue, to learn what thinker Clurman, practical businessperson Crawford, and teacher-psychiatrist Strasberg actually put on stage, starting with their second production, Claire and Paul Sifton’s
1931—
. Produced in the eponymous year with a company of twenty-five,
1931—
had Morris Carnovsky, Stella Adler, Robert Lewis, Art Smith, and the rest of the band doubling and tripling like crazy; as John Mason Brown noted, J. Edward Bromberg appeared as “a mean foreman,” a “news seller,” a “meek Italian laborer,” and a “mean restaurant owner.” “Thus,” Brown joked, “I found his impartiality just a little confusing.” But Brown was impressed by this tale of a young man who quits his job in a dispute with Bromberg’s mean foreman, cannot find another, and sinks into a downward spiral in which he loses everything. “Heartrending,” Brown called it. For while there was “crudity in its writing” it was “beautifully acted.”

On the other hand, “Seldom has a bad play stunned an audience quite so completely” was Brooks Atkinson’s report. Robert Garland denounced it as a “hot-and-bothered propaganda play.” The Siftons originally called it
Son of God,
referring to the first son, Adam. This is the name of Franchot Tone’s protagonist, who illustrates an innovative Fall. In place of original sin we get original hardship: unemployment. From this, all disaster follows on, and Adam ends his journey by joining The Revolution. The last thing we hear, offstage, is the roar of cops’ machine guns.

This would seem to contradict what I said about the Group avoiding propaganda. I bring up
1931—
because, first, it was the Group’s unique venture into this territory;
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and, second, because the unit set decorated by mimed intervals between each plot sequence must have appealed as sheer theatre; and, third, because
1931—
recalls an elucidative anecdote. We look in on a
1931—
rehearsal, sometime between first reading and the premiere; the Siftons, sitting in the orchestra, become impatient when director Strasberg takes forever going over some piece of business with a minor player. Of course, to the others on stage, all business is equal, for any detail illuminates the epic; the Siftons see a waste of time. So Paul rises from his seat and suggests that Strasberg stop jacking off and rehearse the goddamn play.

Strasberg’s reply has come to us in versions both heated and grand. I like a terse one, in which he turns, looks calmly at Sifton, and says, “We are not here to rehearse your play.”

What Strasberg meant was, “We are not here
only
to rehearse your play, but
also
to train ourselves to accommodate all our future plays as well, because what
one
of us learns about acting we
all
learn about acting.”

A more strictly typical Group entry is Sidney Kingsley’s
Men in White
(1933), the Group’s biggest hit at 351 performances. Alexander Kirkland played the protagonist, a self-sacrificing young doctor whose personal life threatens his vocation. So we have the life of an individual under scrutiny in its social context—the format that, as I say, the Group bequeathed to American drama. Of greatest interest to the Group was a sequence set in an operating room, where—with a realism to astonish Belasco himself—doctors and nurses silently went through the ritual of sterilization in “the beat and rhythm [Kingsley demands] of some mechanical dance composition.” The nurses seemed like attendants at some ceremonial, the doctors like practiced custodians of totem, yet all that the mesmerized audience actually saw was the steady washing of hands, the cleaning and careful use of towels (to avoid touching flesh with infected cloth), the great lamp and its mirrors, the glove table, the “gown drum.” At first entirely mimed, the scene eventually opened up into dialogue till the presiding doctor called out, “Scalpel!” As the presiding nurse grasped the instrument, carefully described an arc while passing it over, and slapped it into the doctor’s hand, the stage lights went dark, leaving only the operating lamp to reveal the action. As the doctors leaned forward and the nurses at the rear stood on tiptoe to watch, the second-act curtain fell. On the first night, the house broke into one of the ovations of the decade.

Like
1931—, Johnny Johnson
(1936) typifies the Group by being atypical: because within its parameters the Group did not fear adventure. A pacifist parable that starts realistically then slips into surrealist comedy,
Johnny Johnson
is also a musical. It was hoped that Paul Green (writing lyrics as well as book) and Kurt Weill would give the Group a sort of playeretta, without choreography or Big Sing numbers. However, Strasberg could not travel that far out of his milieu, and Green’s intimate picaresque was lumbered with a ton of scenery in the giant Forty-fourth Street Theatre.
1931—
was a bomb and
Men in White
a smash.
Johnny Johnson
was a valiant failure that in revival invariably notches down to bomb. It needs a champion.
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